EF> Is there any cons[e]nsus among shell developers what the prefer[e]d EF> behaviour is? I just noticed that you understood "shell developers" as "people writing shell code" whereas I originally meant "people writing shells". But, of course, both are interesting.
> Incidentally, this means that, from this point of view, as you described > it, bash on NetBSD is buggy. People could also argue that bash behaving differently on NetBSD than elsewhere is buggy. > As for which behaviour - whether shell builtin or /bin/test - is > better? I'm not sure. Both behave the same way on NetBSD. > I'd say the test is false regardless of whether the second file exists Yes, that's documented. > Personally, I'd tend to treat a nonexistent second file as an > infinitely old second file: -nt is true and -ot is false. I tend to concur, but one could also argue that the test should always fail if the second file doesn't exist along the lines of "I can't confirm X being newer/older than Y because Y doesn't exist". > Just to complicate things, you/we might arguably want A -nt B to be the > same as B -ot A, which disagrees with the above two paragraphs. I wouldn't mind if A -nt B was different from B -ot A, at least not if that's documented.
